This consultation will be open from Tuesday 5th October 2021 at 17:00 CEST to Monday 1st November at 17:00 CEST
Background
R&E federations are key enablers of academic endeavors by facilitating user access to protected online resources, within and across organisations, locally and around the world. They have evolved from seeds planted by select universities to encompass the full range of educational institutions, research institutions, their commercial and governmental partners, and research and scholarly collaborations. The distinctive access needs of the Academy to support trusted collaboration have resulted in a unique combination of technical and policy implementations. We name this singular, global infrastructure, an integration of all of the national R&E federations, Academic Interfederation.
The Federation 2.0 Working Group, following a scenario planning methodology, explored the future of 10 or more years hence. We were concerned about what we saw: variations of dystopia across the Academy. We realised that the community of national Research & Education (R&E) federations is not prepared to navigate the critical uncertainties that will determine their future.
This report sets out a range of recommendations on actions that need to be taken to ensure the future of Academic Interfederation.
Overview
Participants are invited to:
- consider the proposed report
- propose appropriate changes / challenges to the proposed text, and
- reflect on whether the recommendations in the report are valid and correct.
This consultation will be open from Tuesday 5th October 2021 at 17:00 CEST to Monday 1st November at 17:00 CEST
The document for the consultation is available as a pdf attachment. All comments should be made on: consultations@lists.refeds.org or added to the changelog below. Comments posted to other lists will not be included in the consultation review.
Change Log
comment # | Line/Reference # | Proposed Change or Query | Proposer / Affiliation | Action / Decision (please leave blank) |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | general | I think it is strange that a report on Academic Interfederation does not mentioned eduGAIN at all. This seems a significant oversight. | Nicole Harris, GÉANT | |
2 | 616 | The report makes a recommendation that new governance structure for federation be put in place but does not analyse or discuss why the group feels the current models are ineffective. To make this point, i feel this analysis is needed. There are many groups looking at federation - REFEDS, eduGAIN, FIM4R, FIM4L, AEGIS etc. The report does not mention them. | Nicole Harris, GÉANT | |
3 | 627 | "Academic Interfederation exists, but is not coordinated nor resourced as a viable and evolving infrastructure" - this statement implies that the eduGAIN infrastructure is neither resourced nor viable. This needs addressing. | Nicole Harris, GÉANT | |
4 | 1036 and 665 | These comments on the volunteer nature of the community seem to contradict each other. I'd also challenge the participation in REFEDS by many individuals as strictly "volunteer" as most people are participating on paid time from their organisations | Nicole Harris, GÉANT | |
5 | 208 | The use of "federal" and also the examples provided might lead to believe this is a US based thing, which is of cause totally not the case. Perhaps showcasing examples from around the globe would strengthen the notion this is a global effort. | Niels van Dijk, SURF | |
6 | General |
| Josh Howlett, Federated Solutions | |
7 | 341 | The figure refers to the bottom-right quadrant as "Multiply or Divide" but the text beginning on line 341 uses "Multiple and Divide". | Andrew Morgan, Oregon State University | |
8 | 445 | I think this line is a cut-and-paste error. It says, "I Will Survive: A story of directed action under abundant resources", but I think it should be "I Will Survive: A story of autonomous action under limited resources" (or some variation). This is the heading of the Autonomous, Limited scenario. | Andrew Morgan, Oregon State University | |
9 | general | The report does not address specifically the main current interfederation effort, eduGAIN, so the many "calls to action" generically directed to the Academic Intefederation does not have a clear reference and it is difficult to understand who should take action. This is a competing world. It is difficult to imagine that a strong Academic Interfederation leadership will be enough to fight the risk to be marginalized by the BigTech initiatives. The Academic Interfederation must compete on user experience, meeting expectations and technology standards. The Academic Interfederation is invited to "present a single face to the world", but the Academic Interfederation does not exit in a vacuum. It is part of that world that it should interact with. Moreover the "single face" paradigm is not acknowledging the important regional differences of the members of the Academic Interfederation community. A single face or a single voice must be based on the synthesis of the many voices on which the community of reference is composed. | Davide Vaghetti, GARR | |
10 | 546 | In the "Participation and inclusion are the cornerstone of Academic Interfederation" key takeaway, we can read that "success depends on implementing common requirements across each R&E federation", but this is a "slow and unreliable process". Then the proposed solution "To expand participation and make global collaboration more inclusive" is a non sequitur, as it deals with creating new national federations or inclusivity of federated access, but none is said about the main subject which was presented as "implementing common requirements". | Davide Vaghetti, GARR | |
11 | 606 - 612 | Line 608 and 609 both suggest that new /young(er) staff should be hired and trained to take over the role of the more experienced staff. | Casper Dreef, | |
12 | 627-630 | A questionable statement keeping in mind eduGAIN exists and is resourched. | Casper Dreef, GÉANT | |
13 | 932-937 | What is the relevance of this section? | Casper Dreef, GÉANT |